Wednesday, October 18, 2006

An Islamic Newsreel

While Bo Derek is persuading U.S senators to co-sponsor a bill to ban the export of horsemeat for human consumption, as the country recovers from the Great Spinach Scare, as Madonna returns from Malawi with her $3 million dollar baby, and as the news media continues its obsession with American obesity and trans fats in food and simultaneously celebrates the confounding of the Republicans over the Foley Congressional page scandal, the Islamists are marching onward, here and overseas.

I have often wondered what it was like to sit in a movie theater in the 1930's and 1940's and watch the Movie Tone newsreels that preceded the short subjects and double features. Would I have been able to distinguish between the important news and the trivial and human interest? Probably. In the latter '30's and throughout the '40's the Nazis would have dominated much of the news, their rise to power in Europe and their imminent fall at the hands of men who weren't afraid of identifying them as evil and not the least hesitant to dispatching them General George Patton-style.

Ah, yes. General Patton, who didn't believe in "holding one's position," but of advancing and forcing the Hun to "hold" his position, if he could. And when he defeated the Hun, he wanted to draft the German army into the Allied side to fight those fine friends of Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, the looting, raping Soviets before they swallowed half of Europe. The Germans wouldn't have needed much convincing to fight under American and British commanders to defend their country from those human locusts. Patton would have found in ally in Churchill, but not in the White House.

That development, however, was never seen in the newsreels. Instead, Americans saw American, British and Soviet soldiers hugging each other as laughing chums and drinking to the defeat of the Nazis.

Patton doubtless would be censored today, just as he was censored during the war, for asking why the West, and in particular the U.S., was fighting a "holding position" against Islam. If that indeed is what we are doing. It is difficult to tell anymore.

My red flags of suspicion would have gone up if the Associated Press had run a newsreel titled, "Bush Honors Muslims Aiding in Terror War" (October 16). After a mental "Huh?" I would have asked my seatmate: "Does that mean our president is helping the terrorists in their war against us, or vice versa?"

"He's a born-again Christian," she would have replied, "and he can't help it. What do you expect?"

Someone sitting in back of me leaned forward and whispered into my ear, "It's easy to be confused by Bush. He's either a closet Al-Qada, or an Amish Democrat."

"How are they helping?" I would have asked, as I watched our smiling president dine with ambassadors from Islamic nations, U.S. Muslim leaders, and administration officials to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, adding, "Their clerics are preaching jihad against us everywhere. Their Koran permits and encourages it." I would have winced when I heard Bush say to his guests as the cameras rolled, "You know that the majority of the victims of terrorists have been innocent Muslims, and many of you have seen terrorist violence in your own cities and your streets." And I would have said out loud, ignoring the shushing of the audience, "But doesn't that say something about Islam? A lot about Islam?"

"Hey, mister," the guy in the seat on my other side would have chimed, "there are moderate Muslims. Don't be so intolerant. He's against extremists."

"Like, there were moderate Nazis?" I would have countered. And, in the privacy of my thoughts, I would have heeded the logic that both Islam and Christianity, followed and practiced to their moral extremes, meant death. Did it matter if a Muslim was a fundamentalist or a hanger-on?

An image of Patrick Henry speaking in the General Assembly against submitting to Parliamentary authority popped into my mind. On the floor next to him was a moderate Muslim, bowing repeatedly to Mecca in submission to Allah. "There is no reconciliation between Parliamentary tyranny and liberty," Henry was saying. "Nor between that," he went on, pointing to the Muslim, "and this," he concluded, pointing to his forehead. "Would the sergeant-at-arms please eject this odious, cowering...dog from our temple of liberty? He offends mine sight."

That was just a fleeting daydream. The next newsreel featured Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abd al-Aziz, looking up from beneath his headdress with a malevolence I'd only seen in the faces of street thugs, warning his listeners about dealing with "moderate" Muslims. I recalled seeing a still of this creature in The Objective Standard on October 4th. "We are familiar with their relations with foreign elements," the translator was saying. "We are fighting them and will continue to fight them, and we will cut off their tongues." Well, that would be enough to silence any "moderate" Muslims, if they existed. So much for "reforming" the Koran. Then I asked myself: How would one reform or tone down Mein Kampf? It couldn't be done. Both tracts would need to be discarded.

The Saudis were our allies in the war on terror, we are told.

What eludes everyone worried about the "demonization" of Muslims and Islam is that Islam contains a political agenda as well as a religious one. They are woven closely together in Sharia law and cannot be divorced. Christianity was tamed when its political power was neutered, and that was after a hard fight from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The fiery Old Testament took a back seat to the relatively pacific New. Islam is a different animal; it can be defeated only if it is repudiated in its entirety. A big step in that direction would be the vaporization of the Kaaba and the Black Stone of Mecca. Nazism commanded the irrational zeal of a religion; it lost its millions of believers and collapsed when its "paper-hanging" Messiah perished in his bunker in 1945. The same would happen to Islam if Mecca were rendered radioactive gas.

The next newsreel was an "info-mercial" advertising the merits of a new book, the Guide for Individual Jihad, written by Al-Hakaymah. It first appeared on an Islamist website and was reviewed by Geostrategy. Several photogenic Muslims demonstrated on live, illegal Mexicans how a conscientious warrior could contribute to the cause of defeating the West, even in his own backyard, whether in Jihad Alley in Virginia, Des Moines, Iowa, or San Francisco.

These well-groomed, well-dressed gentlemen - not one sporting a ski mask! - showed how infidel Americans, assimilation-resistant Brits, and recalcitrant Frenchmen could be stabbed, fed overdoses of cocaine or heroin, injected with air by needles, burned alive in their homes, blown up in their cars or with roadside IEDs, run over with Saudi-oil fueled SUV's, and even lured to their deaths via the Internet. Do-it-yourself assassination kits were available for only $9.95, not including shipping, and would be sent in plain brown wrapping so as not to alert the authorities.

Al-Hakaymah's book featured a blurb from the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Muhammad Abdul Bari, who boasted that the book contributed to a "positive" image of Muslims, who lately were being "stigmatized. What is happening...has been a barrage of demonization of the Muslim community to such an extent that the community is now scared and feels vulnerable."

As I watched him promote the book up on the big screen, I wondered who was actually feeling scared and vulnerable: Muslims or Tube riders. And the Muslims I saw demonstrating in London in the next newsreel didn't look very scared or vulnerable to me, particularly the ones carrying signs that read "Behead the Insulters of the Prophet," "Kill Arrogant Infidels." One of their spokesmen, addressing a BBC reporter, promised that there would be hell to pay if the 2012 summer Olympics were scheduled during Ramadan that year.

The double feature finally unreeled, "His Girl Friday," and the original British film version of Patrick Hamilton's play, "Gaslight," about a woman driven mad by lamps that kept dimming and brightening (engineered by her scheming husband), much like the assurances of Muslims that they were committed to Western values of freedom of speech and the separation of church and state.

When I got home, I listened to the radio. That was full of depressing news, too. British Airways planned to introduce a special uniform for its Muslim ground staff, and British hospitals had already introduced special burkah gowns for Muslims patients. And some Muslim speech teacher was suspended for insisting on wearing her veil in class, especially if men were present. What was she afraid of? Men would start hitting on her? Or maybe all Muslim women had halitosis, a condition that came with the creed. And that scarf, or hajib, or whatever it was called that went over the hair: Was that to hide lice? Never could believe the "modesty" explanation.

As I prepared to retire, I remembered my seatmate's suggestion that I should write a satire on Islam and the West's incremental submission to it. I wondered now how one could pen a satire about an ongoing tragedy. Perhaps I could begin with President Roosevelt hosting a White House dinner for his moderate Nazi guests, the ones who deplored "extremism" and claimed Mein Kampf was blueprint for peace and coexistence. But, I'd have to combine that with the incremental turn to fascism in the country itself. It was going to be a tough satire to put together, especially if I wanted to make the point that it was no laughing matter.